vinegar hill
Striker
If by that long winded response you're basically saying that it may have been as bad 50 years ago,but we just didn't know it was then you're wrong.There's a few different factors at work and it's fair to say at least that society seems to have degraded and more violence and crime seems to happen, in hotspots at least, than say 50 years ago. At the same time the nature of news reporting - more celebrity guff, fewer local news agencies, smaller staffs at papers - means a lot of things don't make the news.
Counter to that though is that 50 years ago you had fewer papers, no rolling news and no web so it took something big to be reported nationally, whereas now some stories like the fat kid body slamming the bully starts in Australia and goes global in hours. You also had little or no official mechanisms to report abuse of children and little or no ability to scrutinise police and social services, so almost nothing got reported.
It's hard to draw too many conclusions because the way the media reports things can distort perception of crime and the government tries to frig the figures to make themselves look good anyway.
Things are happening now which certainly weren't prevalent when I was a kid in the sixties.